Vervid, the world’s first dedicated Vertical Video platform, launched today promising to reinvent the way we create and experience video on our phones.

“Watch out, YouTube,” warned Doug Harris of Slate Magazine when he discovered Vervid in June, pointing out that YouTube should be providing a better experience for the growing market of users consuming video on their phones.

Mobile video consumption is set to outpace desktop viewing, and engagement is 9x higher with Vertical Video

Vervid delivers content in HD up to five minutes in length, and it doesn’t disappear

“In the 90’s, we gathered around TV’s. In the 2000’s, we curled up with our laptops. Today, video is personal and we consume most of it on our phones. We’re holding our screens vertically 90% of the time, yet there are no platforms dedicated to serving video content exclusively that way,” says John Whaley, Co-Founder and CEO.

John Whaley and Daniel Proksch, a husband-and-husband design and mobile development team with extensive product development experience for Silicon Valley Fortune 500 Companies, started building Vervid last summer in response to anti-Vertical Video PSA’s such as Glove and Boots’ now-infamous “Vertical Video Syndrome.”

“We love a good challenge,” Proksch says. “We’re convinced Vertical Video can be immersive and look great. It just needs a space of its own. Vine did it with the Square aspect ratio. We’re doing the same with Vertical Video.”

Whaley and Proksch see immersive Vertical Video as the next untapped frontier in mobile, an assumption that’s been recently validated with Evan Spiegel’s push to get brands to start embracing vertical video ads.